I dunno, I booted Broken Age up and I was pretty much back to being a teenager playing Monkey Island for the first time.
If you look at the Lucasarts adventure games, their user interfaces generally got simpler and simpler over time. From the dozen or so verbs of Manic Mansion to the four verbs of Full Throttle, and wasn't Grim Fandango (directed by Tim) a one-verb game? It's been a while since I played that one.
But I'm an artist, so I spent a lot of time just going "holy crap this is pretty" anyway. Especially since I played about half of it on my 24" monitor. Oh god so pretty. It's a living painting.

My theory is that Marek is actually just another puppet of the ship.
Shay is clearly being trained for something here. Mother is the first installment - she and her missions are there to instill a basic sense of heroism in a small child. When the child becomes a teenager and starts to chafe at the restrictions, Marek is there to direct the child's rebellion into... well, I'm really not sure. And it's been interrupted. Though I suppose act 2 will tell us something more about that in how Mother, Father, and Marek react to Vella.
It's worth noting that dandelions follow a strategy of growing plants super-cheaply, and sending a LOT of spores everywhere. Insofar as we can anthropomorphize the blind process of evolution, dandelions place no value on the survival of any one particular plant, or seed. Is this a resonance we're supposed to get from "Project Dandelion"?

Like the title says, here's two Mac bugs I've noticed.
1. If you have 'tap to click' turned on in your system trackpad preferences, then any time the hotspot for opening the inventory overlaps a hotspot to walk out out of a room, if I tap then I walk out of the room instead. If I physically click the trackpad it opens the inventory.
Easy reproduction: the room in Vella's side of things with the talking tree.
2. Run the game fullscreen. Hit command-tab to switch out to another program. Command-tab back into Broken Age; the game screen does not reappear. It also doesn't show up in Expose; I had to quit the game and restart it.

I was coming here to mention some Wacom issues too.
On my Mac in full-screen mode, it'd constantly teleport the cursor every time I clicked. Even if I used the Wacom mouse on the tablet. I had to pull out an optical mouse I keep around for playing the occasional FPS to play Broken Age. Which I did for a couple hours and greatly enjoyed.
Not a show-stopping bug by any means, but certainly one I'm hoping to see fixed before act 2 hits the streets.

Yeah, I'm really figuring that this is first pass on the animation and that things like smoothing out the turns are on a task list somewhere. And like I said it may well be a deliberate stylistic choice too, in which case I will live with it.
The video was mostly about the first internal critique session, so throwing in a bit of my own crit as an outside professional felt like the thing to do. Especially since I spent a few years being paid to do this kind of flat animation and learning a lot of the tricks that Double Fine may not know; I think all their previous animation has either been fairly full, or has been full 3D stuff.
(The best place to learn these tricks offhand? Single-frame some episodes of "Foster's Imaginary Friends". One of my co-workers was the Flash director on that show and did some lovely work.)

Just watched episode 8. The shots we saw of the game are looking lovely!
However there's one thing about the animation that's bugging the hell out of me: the headturns. One frame of antic, then POP, they've turned 180º. One frame of settle, that's it. I'm really hoping that's an artifact of the early state rather than a stylistic decision; back when I was working on early Flash stuff at Spümcø, John K would've killed me if I turned in a scene with a headturn like that on anything but the fastest action.
I'd love to see a facing-the-camera head thrown into most of those turns. Maybe even taking all the separate elements of the faces and moving them around a little for a better illusion of dimension on particularly slow turns.
(I also recognize that (a) it's early days yet and (b) there are both stylistic and budgetary decisions to be made here. When I was cranking out 20min/week for a horrible choose-your-own-adventure porn cartoon, we didn't give a damn about any of that kind of smoothness!)

Where did Tim get that sweet Rubik's cube made of colored plastic instead of black with stickers? I want one.
For that matter, how many twisty Rubik's-y puzzled does Tim HAVE? There's there's that one shot where he's got like seven piled up on his desk.

A Big Daddy Roth drawing
A future "body fashion" show where models are showing off different bodies
A black hole's living room
Inside a mechanical timer
The backwards time amusement park
A dragon's panty drawer
Where the shiny metal beetles come from
Tentacle City
The place where everything is a wire sculpture
OMG IT'S TRON WORLD no not really please put on some pants mr maynard or at least get a jockstrap under that thing
The Shark Racing Track
Tiny Rubber Raccoon's Nest
Between the buttocks of a porn star (male or female, your choice - I vote male)
Op Art (this should not be a long segment because OW MY EYES)
Highly Flammable Zone, through which you must travel with a burning torch and avoid immolating
Captain Ahab's scrimshawed wooden leg

So if this project goes all the way to the FULL AWESOME GLORY of RESURRECTING ADVENTURE GAMES... is the new Double Fine 2D Adventure Engine* going to be available for other developers to license, or is it gonna be an internal-use-only tool? I guess it ultimately depends on how solid y'all make it and whether or not it depends on tech you guys don't own. And on how you feel about sharing your custom tools.
also yeah totally voting for some kind of Redbot cameo somewhere in the final product because he makes me giggle to look at, and he will give me that KNOWING INSIDER GIGGLE when I see him in an actual scene. Just a quick background throwaway like the Sam & Max appearances in various Lucasfilm adventures that were not the Sam & Max game,
* DF2AE: least euphonious acronym ever.

Looking pretty good for a first initial test! If Double Fine can figure out ways to animate this kind of look efficiently it might be PRETTY AWESOME. (It's a shame Creature House got eaten up by Microsoft; their vector natural media program "Expression" was amazing, and their animation program that used the same vector natural media technology might have been amazing for quickly tweening these kinds of images. This is something I drew in Expression about a decade ago with a bunch of the stock brushes.)
I wonder how it'd look to have the gradients applied to the characters for lighting have a painterly texture to them instead of a flat gradient? Might look like poop but it might be totally radical. And once you establish doing that, you could even play with different textures to create different moods - what kind of mood would, say, a visibly halftoned gradient establish versus a flat one or a painted one?
And yeah I think it's a given that there will be more detail in the backgrounds and foregrounds, look at the level of detail in EVERY OTHER GAME TIM HAS HELMED and I think that it should be pretty obvious that this is just a VERY EARLY EXPLORATORY TEST. You want to get a bunch of these types of experiments out of the way in the beginning of a big project to figure out how to make it work, instead of deciding halfway through that the whole thing needs to be redone because you finally nailed the style!
(Unless of course you're using a stylistic transition to say something about the world - see the transition between the real world and Toontown in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", or heck, see the cinematics set in the land of the living in "Grim Fandango". Or check out the comic YU+ME: DREAM, which marshals a TON of different styles to indicate different dream-worlds. Which could be pretty damn cool too, though that would require multiple versions of the main character's animation cycles to match different worlds!)
I will admit that I'm not a fan of the tendency Stapey has towards rather blank expressions in his paintings - but I also know that there's a world of difference between the 3-4 stock emotions most artists use when they're just drawing to draw, and the much wider palette of emotions they deploy when there's a narrative to express. I draw a LOT more different expressions when I'm working on a comic than when I'm just drawing random standalone pieces. There's also some stuff in his portfolio that makes me REALLY HAPPY to look at, he's got this painterly riff on Jim Flora going that really kicks ass when it comes together. And which will be SUPER SWEET to see in full animation. Or even smartly-done limited animation; I used to work at Spümcø, so I know the power of a well-thought-out cycle that you use over and over again, or some simple animation that suddenly blossoms into a half-second of beautiful madness. How much animation love they can afford to give to everything depends on how long the actual game ends up being, of course.
tl;dr: thumbs up, this is an interesting start and I look forwards to seeing how this evolves into a polished look over the coming weeks!

I'm a lady who's been playing video games since she got an Atari 2600, so I dunno if I'm typical. But...
Right now most of my gaming seems to be on the iPad. Especially with Llamasoft's crazy little games.
I think the last AAA game I played was Bayonetta. Which is either completely horrible and sexist or is wonderful and empowering, it really depends on whether the idea of running around as a super-sexy witch who wears high heels with guns in them is delightfully over the top to you or not. Having super-moves where said witch's hair turns into giant fists, or monsters, and leaving her naked is also either totally awesome or totally problematic. It's also pretty megaviolent. But oh my god it is one of the prettiest games I have ever played.
In general I'm not interested in fifty-hour epic sagas of A Dude And His Gun, especially if they are "realistically" rendered in every shade of brown and grey available to modern hardware. I like my games to not be serious, and to have bright colors in them. If most of the games you play in front of your girlfriend are MANLY games about SHOOTAN THINGS (with a side order of calling people faggots over voice chat) then I can totally see how she'd be disinterested.
Try some stuff in the "casual" arena, stuff that's short and sweet instead of an EPIC GAME that will take a week to play if you treat it as your full-time job; hook her with small doses instead of HEY HERE IS WAR AND PEACE IT IS AWESOME NO SERIOUSY.

Stuff I've backed:
Electric Sheep Reloaded - a mere $4, for which I requested no reward beyond Patrick Farley postin' more cool comics on the interwebs. Succeeded, and more comics have indeed happened.
Ellie Conelly and the Eye of the Vortex - $30 for a copy of the comic. Failed, as the author is not famous enough to get a year's salary in advance. Which is a shame because (a) the comic is awesome and (b) he kinda burnt out on it after the Kickstarter fell through.
Double Fine Adventure - $15 for the downloadable game. I think we all know how this one went.
rails.app - $10 to help create the Ruby on Rails equivalent of MAMP. Fully funded in two days, still in progress.
Also I've got a Kickstarter in progress to print this SF comic I've been doing for the past year called "Decrypting Rita". It's about a day and a half old and it's 80% funded, which is making me squeal with glee and dance around a lot. I think this is mandatory for one's first Kickstarter. No link as self-promotion is officially NOT ALLOWED HERE.